 Okay, welcome everyone and thank you for joining us at Mechanics Institute online for our program, Bohemians West. Free Love, Family and Radicals in 20th Century America with author Sherry L. Smith in conversation with Dr. Peter Blodgett of Huntington Library of San Marino, California. I'm Laura Shepard, Director of Events at the Mechanics Institute. The opening of the 20th century saw a grand cast of radicals and reformers fighting for a new America, and in the thick of this heady milieu were Sarah Bard Field and Charles Urskine Scott Wood, two aspiring poets. Self declared pioneers of free love, Sarah and Urskine exchanged hundreds of letters that charted a new kind of romantic relationship, and their personal pursuits frequently came into contact with their deeper engaged political lives. Sarah also became a star of the suffrage movement, culminating in her making a cross country car trip in 1915 and gathering hundreds and thousands of signatures for the petition that went to Congress. Charting a passionate and tumultuous relationship that spanned decades Bohemians West offers a deeply personal look at a dynamic period in American history. And also if you're new to Mechanics Institute, we were founded in 1854, and we're one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural cultural centers that's in the heart of San Francisco. We have an incredible vast library, International chess club and ongoing author and literary programs, and of course our Friday night cinema film series so please visit our website. The building is closed, but you can also get books to be picked up to go so please get your books online and come pick them up at the front door. This talk will also be followed by Q&A so if you have questions for our guests, please hold them and put them in the chat at the end. And Sherry's book, Bohemians West will be on sale at alexanderbook.com. Now I'd like to introduce our guests. Sherry L. Smith is the University Distinguished Professor of History, Emeritus at Southern Methodist University. A historian of the American West and Native America, Native America. Smith's award-winning books include Hippies, Indians and the Fight for Red Power, and also Reimagining Indians, Native Americans through Anglo Eyes 1880 to 1940. She is former president of the Western History Association and received the Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellowship at the Huntington Library, which supported research for Bohemians West. Smith has also been honored with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Yale University, and she has a dual life in Moose, Wyoming, and Pasadena, California. And our other guest tonight is Dr. Peter Blodgett. He is the H. Russell Smith Foundation Curator of Western American History at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. He is joining the Huntington in 1985. He has overseen the library's collection of history of the North American West from 1800s to the present. And Blodgett has spoken and published widely on the national parks, tourism, and recreation, as well as the management of all of the manuscripts and archives. In his most recent projects, they've included geographies of wonder to consecutive exhibitions on Americans National Parks, and also edit a volume called Motoring West volume one automobile pioneers 1900 to 1907. And that's published by the University of Oklahoma Press. So please welcome Sherry Smith, author of Bohemians West and Dr. Peter Blodgett. Thank you, Laura, for that wonderful introduction. I am so sorry I cannot come to see your beautiful library. I'm hoping one of these days to come and see it. I've seen photographs of it and it looks absolutely stunning. In the meantime, I'm so appreciative of your willingness to host this evening's event and I'm equally appreciative of Pam who's working behind the scenes to help us all work and of course my good friend Peter Blodgett to join me from the Huntington Library. So I'm envisioning this as a conversation between me and Peter because we've known each other for many years and Peter knows a good deal about these characters as well. So I'm just really looking forward to it. Certainly a phenomenal pleasure for me to undertake this conversation. Having had such a long and productive friendship with Sherry enjoying the opportunity each time she's come to the Huntington to do whatever I can to assist her in the course of her research. And I think it's particularly appropriate than an institution like the San Francisco Mechanics Institute library is hosting us this evening because I think it's true that certainly for me as an employee of libraries but also Sherry as a frequent flyer in the use of them to have such a setting in which to convene our discussion. I wanted to make sure to try and get us off to a productive discussion so I have a couple of questions in my back pocket. But I'm hoping very much as Sherry suggests that our conversation will unfold as we move across the fascinating story that Sherry has put together in this absolutely splendid piece of writing. So I guess I would start us off by asking Sherry how and where did you first encounter Sarah Bardfield and CES Wood. Well, these are two people that most of the listeners here I assume probably do not know. And they're not particularly well known literary figures are historical figures so it is a good question how did I find them and why did I want to write about them. So the answer to that is that a long time ago I was working on a dissertation on US Army officers and their personal reflections on fighting Native American people. And that brought me into the orbit of Charles Erskine Scott Wood and Pam if you wanted to show the first slide. I have a picture of him as a young Army officer in 1877. And he particularly interested me I was looking at any officer I could there's Erskine on the these are two pictures of Erskine this is Erskine the Army officer on the left. He had 150 different officers, but he really stood out because he was so first of all handsome what can I say, but also so interesting as as it turned out a very reluctant soldier his father made him go to West Point. And so he ends up in the Army where he did not want to be in his heart of hearts he thought he should be a poet, you know, and so there he was fighting Indians with whom he sympathized. And in fact, at the end of the Nespierce war he befriended Chief Joseph, and sent his own son not to West Point as his father had sent him, but instead to live with Chief Joseph so this was a remarkable army officer, and it was interested in him so it turns out that the Huntington Library had some of his papers, including his diaries from the Nespierce war, but it's a huge collection Peter how many boxes are there all together in the wood collection. I think we were, I think that collection runs to over 300 boxes just in the main part of the collection and that's not including other things that we can talk about later. Okay, so I saw the finding aid. And I noticed that there are all these boxes of letters to this woman and from this woman named Sarah Bard Field and I could not help myself but want to know what is that about. So I actually requested one of those boxes and I discovered dipping into those letters that this was an affair that began really when they met in 1910. It lasted for many, many years, and so there were over a thousand, a couple thousand letters that they wrote just to each other. And I, you know, it was just so fast and it was just drawn in immediately but I wasn't there to be studying that so I had to put it aside. And so I said to myself though Sunday I'd like to go back and and see if I can make a story if there's a story to be told about this actually. So that is how I discovered both of them. And it was a number of decades later before I was able to actually go back and read all of those letters and that took me a while to do that. And to read the letters they wrote to their own spouses and their, the other person's spouses and their children and the many, many famous people that they knew along the way as well. So I, that's how I discovered them. Now this is a photograph of wood in 1877. Some people look at that and think, oh, he looks like a callow lad. Others think, hmm, he looks kind of, you know, interesting. And he had, as you can see, a great deal of confidence even as a young man. The other photograph is CES wood in 1918. He and Sarah met in 1910. So he looked more like the fellow on the right by the time Sarah met him. So we can go on to the next slide and just so you can get a glimpse of what Sarah looked like. So he was the person that kind of drew me in, but she was the one who kind of captured my, my interest in the end because she was the one who actually changes over the course of the correspondence and of the relationship. So I love this, these two pictures, because the one on the right is the first photograph that Sarah gave Erskine and she calls it Liberally Yours. And I guess what she meant by that, what she appears to be, not unlike people's stereotype of what a librarian looks like. She was not a librarian. She was in fact the wife of a Southern Baptist minister. But this was her first photograph that she gave him. The one on the left is one that was actually, the two captions are actually switched around. And one on the left was taken about six years later. I love the contrast because she really changed tremendously in those six or seven years between the time she first met him, where she appears to be a very proper and prim, the tightly woven woman. And then the other one, her hair is sort of let down and she's much more relaxed in her dress and she has really become a very different person in this photograph that's on the left. So those are the central characters and I met them at the Huntington Library. And happy we are that you did because it's been such a productive encounter, both in terms of what you've drawn from them, but also what you've told us about them as well. To elaborate a bit on that then I guess I'd next ask what aspects of either their individual characters or your individual experiences really captivated your interest as you became more familiar with them. Well, as I may have hinted, both of them were actually married to, they were married when they met. And so I knew right away this was not your sort of typical traditional and acceptable love affair for 1910. And they met when Clarence Darrow came to town. Now would have been living in Portland for quite some time after the army, he became a lawyer. And he went back to the Northwest, and he had five children, six actually one died quite young, but five children with his very lovely wife. And he was quite the character, not only because of his common and socially, but also politically he was self described philosophical anarchist, by which he meant that I guess he would be closest now to what we would call libertarian but he believed that individual freedom was the most important value in his life. And he felt that his whole life he had been sort of doing with his father wanted him to do and then he got married and he had to be, you know, take care of his family and all he ever really wanted to do was to be a poet. So he really felt that he'd been repressed by circumstance and so on and so forth and he was really aching to be free. And in the end that meant including free of the restrictions of marriage. So he was a philosophical anarchist. He was a huge supporter of labor, free speech, anti imperialism. He didn't talk about civil rights so much but certainly human rights he was concerned about Native American rights. And finally, he was an advocate and now spoken advocate of free love, even though he remained in this marriage with nanny. So, he was a lawyer, he knew Clarence Sarah presumably from the law, I don't really know where they have met Clarence. So and Sarah also had, she had a rather firm patriarchal father almost tyrannical she presents them as not very loving father. She had hoped to go to college. Her older sister Mary, I did go to college and when she went to the University of Michigan she came home and their father was also actually a Baptist and you know very, very committed Baptist and Mary began to sort of revolt against her father's theology and so he did not want his next daughter Sarah to go off to college and have the same thing happen. So he told her she could only go to a college in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which was then Baptist affiliated. And she didn't want to do that. So instead what did she do she married a man who was a Baptist minister. So that was her idea of revolt. Anyway, they went off to Burma she came back but she was getting involved herself in politics particularly progressive politics. And that's how she met, she met Clarence Darrow in that context, but the other part of this is that Clarence Darrow was her sister Mary's while they were having a love affair. So her sister Mary was Clarence Darrow's mistress so this gets you know. Okay, so her husband, Reverend air guy has called out to Portland to take up a church and Sarah is telling Darrow. I don't know what I'm going to do Portland seems so far away she thought of as provincial boring place. He said don't worry. I know a man there who I think he will like. And it was of course would. So when he came to Portland in 1910, he invited Sarah and her husband, and would to dinner. And that's how the two of them met. And so that kind of sets up I think a lot of things about this story that are, you know, I couldn't help but be drawn to. I'm not quite ready to go to this one but we can. I think we should say that right thanks Pam. So, so all of you know from the very beginning then this is going to be a an interesting love affair. They share a great deal they share political points of view they share a love of poetry. They share a feeling that they had been kept from being their true selves by again circumstance and so on so forth so they were drawn to one another. And they were the letters are just incredible they're very long they're very rich. And I was amazed at how they were different every single one of them was different so I was never born with that oh not this again. So it's the combination of who they were before they met how they met, and then this rich incredible archive that allowed me to not only see the beginnings of this but how it unraveled over time. The users of. Oh yes the weather is lovely, you know, Kay is, you know, off to school today and, you know, we're, we're going to the opera tonight kind of letters were they. No they were not I mean, they were extremely introspective. Some would say narcissistic. We could never say such a thing right. Right, but they were, they were quite aware that what they were doing would not be considered appropriate by many people. So, some of their letters read as if they are trying to justify and explain themselves and the behaviors and the choices that they're making. So they were, they were intellectuals both of them are intellectuals and thoughtful. They were deep thinkers and they were often apart. So they had a lot of opportunity to try to talk about the things that were most important to them. And that included politics had included their families. It included what they thought they were doing, and actually fairly early on. This is I think very interesting. I'm going to go back to Laura to keep every letter because he said, I believe we are pioneers and free love. What we are trying to do here is we are trying to create something new and different. And by the way, by free love, he meant love that was sanctioned by neither church or state did not need to have that sanction. All you needed was the love itself, and it should be freely given. Over time, it dissipates, then you should be free to separate. So freedom, liberation. I mean, these are all the words that matter to him a great deal. So the letters and deal with lots of issues of consequence. And then of course they also deal with the issues that develop in the relationship itself. One of the things that I think you're most successful in doing is a series of pithy characterizations that that really foreground some of the essential aspects of what's happening in the course of the book both as you just so well put it the larger social political context and also the interiorality. If I can make up such a word of the relationship. One of the phrases I was most struck by is something early in the book in the introduction which you say for all its light and joy. They are fair cast long shadows. I, as you read through the book, you're constantly. I'm constantly drawn back to that remark, but you sketch out a bit of the, you know, the type of shadows that we're talking about how that it's casting and over whom. Yes, that's a big part of the story that I wanted to tell. And they provided me with a lot of evidence to tell that story. And the point here is that this is not simply an affair between two people and how they felt about each other and what they did for each other and sometimes to each other. They were both very much in a nested in families. And so when they chose to pursue this relationship. And for a while for quite a while actually it was secret, at least Sarah's husband didn't know about it. But certainly Erskine's wife knew that he was not only an advocate of free of a practitioner of free love before living with Sarah. So I really wanted to tell the story as widely as I could in terms of the networks in which they operated. So in terms of the family. Unfortunately, nanny Erskine's wife did not write letters about this so I do not really have her perspective all I have is what he was telling me she said and I didn't always think I could trust him. Reverend air got did write letters and to Sarah and to Erskine. So I was able to hear firsthand from him how incredibly painful. This was for him, of course, you know he was, he was a wonderful man in many ways, extremely supportive of Sarah. He understood she was an intellectual woman who needed to get outside the home and so he was encouraging her to do to do that including to work for would as his literary editor. He supported her in the women's suffrage movement. He was a Christian socialist. So they shared. She saw herself as a socialist. They shared many political values. He did everything he could really to give her a home and they had two small children besides. So I wanted to pursue as much as I could what this did to the spouses. And I also wanted to pursue what it did to the children. And interestingly, as I mentioned, Sarah's children were quite young. I should have this at the top of the tip of my tongue and now I can't remember but I want to say her daughter was four and her son was seven or something like that so they're really really small children and Erskine's children were older. In fact, they were married and he was a grandfather yet very tightly connected to their father. He was a generous, wonderful man. And so he was a very important person to his children too. So I was able to through this long saga find letters from the children as well. And what they're saying about the children before the children are writing letters so it provided me with an opportunity to look at what infidelity can do to both spouses and to children. So that's where the pain is sometimes most seringly represented. I think nobody better than Reverend, Reverend Aragon really can conveys the deep pain of that, and also the anger as it turns out. In terms of they also hurt each other. So there's that as well. So I'm not sure if I've answered your question but that's that's those are some of the shadows. That's exactly what I was thinking of and it leads very nicely into the question of how the personal is so inextricably intertwined with the political or the professional. In your telling of the account there's really very little space sometimes between those lives and I'd be interested to hear you speak a bit about their, their personal political passions and the intersection that develops between those passions over time. Okay. Yeah, so I mean their political lives were extremely important to both of them, and they were very much integrated into their personal experiences in a personal relationship. Now Peter you are frozen are you am I are they're still hearing me. You're fine Sherry go ahead. Okay, great. What they what they wanted to do as individuals and as a couple, because they were part of this radical movement in the early 20th century to change the world. And so they wanted to change the broader world they wanted to, to bring into the American economic system, greater equality and both of them super supportive of labor particularly even the radical elements of labor. They also wanted to remake the marriage and family. So, and that was not only a personal sort of goal in their own lives but a larger goal of what they thought they were going to be music pioneers and this new way of, of creating love relationships and family so really the political and personal which we often associate with the women's movement of the 70s and the personalist political and vice versa, absolutely prevails here. And on almost everything, the two of them were in agreement about what their position was and what they thought the solutions were to create, you know, better lives for people and better families and love relationships and that sort of thing. But the one initial allow me to talk a little bit about this slide. One area where Sarah becomes incredibly involved is the women's suffrage movement, particularly related to the 19th amendment. Now Sarah was a feminist and she was a suffragist, but she really wasn't drawn into activism until 1912. And this is when she and would have been having this affair for about a year, but she's still living with Reverend air dot. And she is looking for something to do to provide her with a profession and a possible living, because she's planning to leave air got, and she's also hoping to keep the kids and if she can prove to a court that she is a fit mother, and that she can support her children, that's to the good so what happens is she's she's invited by a very good friend to join the Oregon suffrage movement in 1912. At this point is still the state by state process that's that's happening here. And so she is traveling all over the state of Oregon trying to convince men to enfranchise women in the election of 1912. And in the course of that she discovers that she's really good at this. And she was a very skilled orator she was, she could change the message to the audience. She was just very successful, not only did suffrage pass but she gained confidence that she could, you know, she really does have some skills here that can be translated into more political activism. She finally at the end of this of that year left she had told air got that she no longer loved him that she was going to leave the home. And that she was eventually planning to be with earth in wood, but she left and went down to California. And so while the other issues are being resolved divorce and so forth she finally finds herself back in the suffrage movement in 1915. When there is a wonderful Panama Pacific exposition in San Francisco, and the National Women's Party which is one of the suffrage organizations decides to have a booth there, and have a petition where they will ask particularly Western women who already have the vote to sign a petition demanding the 19th amendment be created and ultimately passed by Congress. So Sarah was hired to demand this booth that the Panama Pacific exposition. And at the end of that Alice Paul who had started this women's party said to Sarah, I think you should take this petition now and they claimed it was four miles long, the thousands and thousands of signatures. And again the point was for Western women voters to demonstrate to Congress and the President Wilson we have power, we want to use our power to push this amendment, but Alice Paul's idea was why don't you take it to Congress but take it by car. And so this is the car and there's two women standing to the to Sarah's left are the two Swedish American women who purchased this car in California and offered to drive Sarah and another woman who dropped out across the continent to deliver this petition to Congress. So this was a phenomenal thing to do. I mean there first of all women and driving was you know people didn't many people didn't think women were capable of driving. Secondly, Sarah was not going to drive. Excuse me. There were no maps must make a long story short they did get in this car and they did make it all the way across the country. Now, at this point, Erskine was still supportive of women's suffrage. But as Sarah got more involved in the women's party. Wilson was disagreeing with some of the tactics that they were using, particularly in 1916, the National Women's Party tried to get every woman voter to vote only for candidates who would support the amendment and come out publicly and supported it. And anybody else who didn't want to support the amendment they should not vote for so they were making that the single issue of the air day. And they were hoping that it would work, particularly that Wilson would not get relented because he had not come out in favor of would not publicly support the amendment or use any political muscle he had to to push it forward. And Erskine thought that was a really bad idea. He, he was a philosophical anarchist but he also was a pragmatist and so he didn't get in. He got involved in politics and he was a big Wilson supporter. And in 1916, he thought the war was a more important issue and that Wilson had promised to keep us out of the war. And that that more women were actually going to vote for him in favor of that position than against him because he wasn't coming up with an amendment. Well this led to a great deal of go back and forth between Sarah and Erskine. For the first time, they were on different sides of the political issue. And earlier in their relationship Sarah would always sort of bow down to him and defer to him and he was the wiser the more politically experienced the smarter whatever. But by this time, she has really come into her own. She has found her own voice she knows who she is she believes, permanently in her principles, and in what they were trying to do. And so she begins to write to him I'm bigger than you know I'm bigger than you I am much more committed to these issues that are really going to bring the vote in this case to a lot more people and what's the matter with you. So there was that but this below that was also her anger with him, because he had not left Portland yet and come to join her this is you know, six, seven years after they met. So, you know they they begin to come apart at this and it looks like they might even break up, but not so much over the political issue as the personal stuff, but that's the one point where you can really see a turning point and she has grown in self assurance and and grown in confidence, and that changes the nature of their relationship as well. So the politics and the personal are intertwined all the time. I think that's, that's particularly obvious at a point when you are discussing this very process. It's in the, I think the latter years of the relationship between the two when they are not physically together. And you mentioned Sarah at one point coming to display a steely willed resolve to get what she wanted. And, you know, clearly, that becomes tied in with her. What's psychological, personal, but also political blossoming during the involvement with suffrage, at least so I would, I would say. Yes, yes, absolutely. That's, that's what I'm trying to art, but I try to argue. And now I guess I should say she had really leaped off the edge. When she left her husband, and left Portland and any sort of security. She lost her children, frankly, she had given up a lot for this relationship. And would as far as she could tell hadn't come anywhere close to doing what she had done. And his reason, I will say, was that he was waiting for this huge windfall from a big case has been going on for many years. He did not feel he could leave Portland in his law practice until he got this huge windfall so that he could create very robust trust funds for his wife, who would never divorce him and for his grown children. So that was what he was saying I cannot go I cannot come to you until that happens. So he was always pretty honest about that but it was frustrating for her. So in the meantime she is she is involved in this movement in the company of incredible women I mean she got incredible support from women, some of them who thought she was crazy to hang on and wait for Erskine. So that's the thing about her this was what mattered to her most. She cared about suffrage but what she really wanted in life was to live with Charles Erskine Scottwood, because she believed that they were true soulmates, and that the greatest happiness would come to her and to him as a couple and so she did not give up. And ultimately she did actually get what she wanted and so we do have another slide I think that maybe shows the two of them. And as it turned out World War One was the thing that actually led to the resolution of the of the legal case and would finally did get this huge windfall in 1918 and so by the end of 1918. And although his family didn't completely understand that he wasn't planning to come back he wasn't completely forthright with him about that. But he did come to live with her in San Francisco this report was taken sometime in the fall I believe of 1918. So I don't think it would have happened without her determination and I think the suffrage movement as I say did as you indicated sort of steal her and give her greater confidence to to ultimately prevail. And I will say that it lived together at this point until 1944 when he died. So she didn't have those 20 some years together with him. So the story you tell of the evolution to this next stage of the relationship is a fascinating one of two people who are so intertwined with their personal their personal fascination. I was really struck near the end of the book by how you so effectively characterize their life, especially in the Bay Area suburb of Los Gatos at their cell at the time celebrated a state when you they wanted to transform their home and their very lives into works of art and the success they had in that. But I thought that's a really striking phrase. Well thank you Peter. They did see themselves as poets they saw poetry writing poetry to be the sort of highest level of human experience and what you should you know what you should do with your life if you possibly can. They were always writing about the truth and beauty and all these kinds of things. They cultivated friendships with literary people and artists especially once they got together in San Francisco although would from his early days when he was living in New York City when he was going to law school really always grab it toward toward artists and so forth so they this was their idea of the of the perfect life. Now interestingly enough they often justified their relationship on the basis of what would come of this is great poetry. She thought Erskine was going to be the next Walt Whitman. He knew better. He knew he did not have that kind of talent. That was kind of how they impart how they justified the choices that they made were doing this for art as it turned out. Well let me just back up for a second and say to the listeners there who are probably primarily in the Bay Area. Wood came down for a short time. He lived in Corda Madera but he had rented a house on Russian Hill for Sarah where she had lived for many years so he pretty soon comes over to Russian Hill so they lived in Russian Hill and they rented one and then they bought one and those houses are still there by the way. And then by the 20s the mid 20s they moved down to this beautiful estate that's kind of between Los Gatos and Santa Cruz and the Santa Cruz Mountains. But their purpose from 1918 on was to try to put politics aside now they had devoted a lot of time and treasure to that. But now they wanted to devote their lives that they could file it together to poetry. It turned out their poetry wasn't that good. Really sadly he was no Walt Whitman. But you know he did some pretty good stuff and Sarah actually had some pretty interesting New York publishers for her work as well. But they were never going to be well known and that was not going to be their mark on life. But they had wonderful friends and just for a moment I'd just like to mention some of the people that they knew from the political years Emma Goldman and you know Lincoln Stephens and of course Clarence Darrell I mentioned and Jack Reed and just all this cast of characters in their political years and then of course in San Francisco they got to know particularly when they went down to Los Gatos Robinson Jeffers and so they would have these wonderful parties at the at the cats as they called it with with these literary figures and one of my favorite moments actually was when Lincoln Stephens came to to see them there. And he said to them you know what you have created here is really this is beauty this is art and it was in the way in which they had created this lovely life in Los Gatos that was probably their greatest sort of achievement in terms of trying to reach for a model of how to live a life that is beautiful that has at its core production of art and so they had many happy years there. I think when I was going to have a 73rd birthday he said something like you know it all turned out okay. And I think I make a little comment that well yes you know it did for you I'm not so sure that everybody the spouses would have agreed but they do finally achieve personal happiness and satisfaction when they live together particularly in Los Gatos. It's kind of unusual. Let me just say it's the most thing. A lot of people look at these pre love relationships and say they do they were not successful but this is one that actually was successful if you look at longevity and that sort of thing as success. One of the things I really appreciate is your. I don't want to necessarily say complete this passion, because you clearly are very invested in the story you're invested in the people, but you have a lovely capacity for standing back and saying, in a sort of Hemingway ask fashion after Sarah or CES has gone on and on for pages of philosophical meanderings. Well it would be pretty to think so. But you you have a genuine investment in them that allows you a capacity to to speak to them in terms of of their strivings which is in many ways all any of us can do and I really like what is I think it's your concluding sentences. Their love was not always beautiful, and it was never perfect, but it was vital, full, and sometimes brave. I think that is just fabulous. I think that. Thank you Peter just brings their story to such a point. Well, I pretty early on discovered when I would talk to other people that people would respond very strongly to them, and often not like them. And that's what surprised me in a way because they didn't even know very much about them but they didn't like there was something about the story they didn't they, I'm not going to like I don't like this person. So what happened with me was, obviously I like them to begin with or I wouldn't have spent all this time. I was going to learn more about them and see how valuable they could be and things that could do that I did not like. There were things about them I did not like. But when I came to writing this story. I didn't want to tell people what to think. Now that was also sort of a new departure for me as you know as an academic historian you're supposed to have an argument. You have an interpretation, you want everybody to see it your way and you've marshaled the evidence this was something very different I wanted to tell the story, and actually do what you said back away, try to tell the story as honestly as I could, but let people decide for themselves, where they come down on this because that I think in the end is the value of the story. And these are people who are taking chances and risks and making choices that some of us have made and some of us have been too afraid to make. But they also thought about it is not about it deeply, and they left this rich record that helps us track it and think and watch as they make these changes and choices and you think oh my gosh and then. I think well I really admire them for this. So that is I think what I'm trying to convey. I want to help people understand them. They don't have to like them. That's okay but I think that if they stick with it they will find the story interesting, they will reflect upon their own choices, and that it can be of some value there. And one of the other part of this is that I do believe that it does transport you back 100 years and gives you a sense of what it was like to be in the sufferers movement what it was like to try to be involved in a free love elicit as a fair, but it was like to go to court and defend free speech which Erskine does you know I think very bravely. So there are moments when they are both very brave and there are other moments when they are just exasperating and not very attractive people like most of us. Well I there are a million more points that I would love to bring up but I think it's time for us to turn to Laura to see about reaching out to our listeners for some questions. So, if you've got questions for Sherry and also for Peter please put your questions in the chat and while you're doing that I'm going to come up with our for the first query. Two things. First of all, you know, Erskine had an introduced Sarah into writing and being a journalist with the Portland paper and I'm just wondering if her journalism continued through her suffrage work. In San Francisco and beyond and then the other question was, did they have any interaction with Eugene O'Neill and his wife, because they weren't in San Francisco they're also at the Dow House and Danville I'm just wondering if they had any connection with them. I'll answer the first the second question first as far as I know no they never I mean if they had I would have certainly paid attention. There's no correspondence, no mention of him as far as I know so I don't know why not, but they did not as far as I know. In terms of the journalism gambit that was actually the first effort for Sarah to try to see if she could have a profession. Away from her husband. And this was the famous McNamara trial in 1911 and Sarah's sister was a journalist. And so she was going to be covering the trial so Sarah went down there to live with her but frankly the money for Sarah's expenses were being paid I'm pretty sure by Erskine. And she, she was really not very good at it. She was rather wouldn't. And, you know, and actually that the trial ended up being, well they did to the McNamara brothers said that they were guilty so the trial never even went to the trial phase. She was only there to cover jury selection so on. So she, she felt sort of frustrated by she didn't think she was very good and she wasn't very good. So she decided journalism was probably not going to be her profession. And she had to go to Nevada for the divorce and stay there for a while she did a little bit of journalism there that was published but I think she she realized that she was no Mary field her very talented sister journalist and that instead she would do the suffrage movement. And also how many signatures were they able to accrue during their cross country petition and then what kind of celebrity came out of that arriving in Washington and also with the national movements just a little more detail about that. And so, since we just finished our suffrage 100 celebration. Yes, you know I do not know how many signatures they actually got and I wonder where that is now, but she claimed it was over four miles long. So there were quite a few. As they were going across the continent they would stop in places like Salt Lake City and China and Wyoming and Chicago and gather additional signatures as they went along so, but, but really the, the brilliance of that whole thing was not so much the petition signatures. But the fact that this was just a phenomenal thing to do I mean this is a wild and crazy adventure that attracted a good deal of attention from the media. So Sarah became something of a media celebrity all across the country people were tracking this crazy woman's adventure here. And so by the time she got to New York City, New York was even interested in going out and seeing this car I mean this was a big big deal. And so Sarah kept a scrapbook of all the articles that had been written about her. So, and she went and met President Wilson. So, yeah, she, she could have actually built on that. In fact, Alice Paul would have been delighted to have her stay in Washington DC, because she was not only a very skillful supporter, but her audience was ready to write checks she was great at fundraising as well. But you know she wanted to be with Erskine and she wanted to go back to California and try to bring him down so she didn't really pursue the celebrity that she had gained from this expedition. But I will say this that it has not been forgotten I don't know if your viewers have seen the PBS series called the boat as a four hour documentary about suffrage. At the very beginning of part two, they start with Sarah, leaving the exposition grounds in San Francisco and they spend a number of minutes on this so she has been remembered for this trip for sure. Let's see, anything else that you asked me about that. Yeah, I think right now on there let Pam take over and read some of the questions that are in the chat. So, there's a question from Sinbad. I'm curious whether they had any connections with Jack London social circle, another openly public proponent of the free love movement of the time. Well, Peter, you know, course that Huntington has gigantic Jack London collection and Sue Hudson who happens to be your wife has written about Jack London. Would you like to take a crack at this one. Do you know about this. I remember that to certainly would traveled in many of the same circles. I don't know that they had many connections I'm sure that London, especially in his yours for the Revolution phase, would have admired certain aspects of what they undertook at the same time. CES is corduroy suit, you know, for four square pocket, you know, artwork and so forth would have given him pause. It would really actually be very interesting for someone. Possibly my dear spouse who I think is sitting in on on tonight's festivities to actually look into that because, you know, would is that other generation. And it would be interesting to think what did he think of one of Woods works like poet in the desert, or, you know, similar things. London was always a man in a hurry though so he usually didn't stop to think too much about anybody else he, he was pushing forward to the, you know, the next book. So he could get the next payment of royalties. Yeah, I mean you would expect that their paths had crossed but I have no, again, no documentation of that having happened. He was very well connected with the New York Bohemians of Greenwich Village actually from his New York days and so on. So he knew Max Eastman, you know, all that crowd. Then he seemed to hang out with Jack London, which is interesting. I never thought about that before, but that's a really interesting question. But I found no evidence of any relationship there. I, it would be interesting. You can write something in the chat. It would be interesting to do a backdoor look to and see if John Reed and Louise Bryant to radicals focused in Portland area, made any, any sort of backdoor type of connections but of course, by that point we're coming down towards the point past Jack London's life. So, can savvy. Well there's a question from Barbara. Was their free love experiment successful in that would had several other relationships but Sarah remained monogamous. Okay, I have to tell you that's my sister who has read this book and so thank you Barbara. And it was a huge issue between Sarah and Erskine. What does free love mean, and within the dynamics of the relationship, and Erskine's position was free love means free, but he was not from this case. But never what he was not going to promise to remain true to only one sexual partner. And it was really only when they were apart which was long stretches of time that he would have somebody else he had he was kind of a serial. I don't know lover. So he had a number of different relationships, even after he and Sarah, although he always told her she was number one and but first she tried really hard to convince him that this was not the way to go. She just really had a hard time with that but he was not going to give he was not going to give. So she kind of had to adjust accepted. And so there, there were two women in particular, that he had engaged relationships within Portland, while she was down in California or back is working on suffrage. She would tell her about it eventually he often wasn't forthcoming at the beginning. She would become upset but in the end, it was just something that she had to accept she had really no interest in other men, there are other men who are interested in her, and she would certainly tell would about them, hoping I think to get him jealous. But, but he knew that she was really not likely to create a relationship with another man but he told her if you did. I think I'll be big enough to be able to accept it so that was a big issue between the two of them. Once they came once he came to San Francisco then that just totally evaporated it was no longer a source of tension. And Marie asks, are there living descendants that remember them. Did you interview any of them. I should actually Peter has met some of them but I'll just answer this fairly quickly. I have met several of them great great granddaughters actually, and they did not know them although actually Sarah I have to say Sarah would Smith did know Sarah Bardsfield and I did talk with her. The other words that I met did not know them. And actually I mean I'm pretty sure I think I know a lot more than they do, but it would have been great, you know to talk to people who actually did know them and interacted with them and I would have gotten some I'm sure value out of that. So but Peter has actually you met Sarah's daughter right Peter. Actually, I worked with K called well in the 1990s. Sarah's daughter. Yes, and thank you, Jerry. And actually, K was doing some earthquake renovating in their house. The house that she and her husband Jim called well had occupied for so long he was Berkeley faculty right Jerry. And she found significant cash of materials, which she generously gave to the Huntington and it became the CES would collection at end of which Jerry fortunately was able to use in the collection and K was a fascinating individual. I made much less of it than Sherry would have. But it was still a marvelous opportunity to hear from her about pops, which was the term that she and her brother Albert used to refer to CES. And I got hints of the sometimes tenuous relationship between K and Sarah, and it was personally it was it was. It was rewarding for me to hear of how they had in their time, come to a place of repose between between each other, and that K and Sarah were able to establish what sounded like a rewarding and loving relationship, but I was not. It was not easy. And to hear that from someone in that moment when was really striking. Jody Stephenson asks, what were their thoughts on religion. Wood was an atheist will not shock people to learn that about him. He was actually fiercely anti Catholic, because why was Catholic and when they were before they got married he just wrote her this credible letter from the west about all the things that were wrong with Catholicism and so forth. And I think it was because her kind of was saying that you marry this guy you have to raise your children Catholic. But so, you know, this is sort of the worst abuse of power the Catholic Church and so on and so forth. So he was not interested in religion at all. And Sarah as I say was raised Baptist and had been married to a Baptist minister, but when that relationship crumbled, she left the church and later in life got very interested in Eastern religions and found some solace in that but for the most part, she put religion aside. I would like to just say one thing if I can back about Kay the daughter of all of the characters in this book and it sometimes reads like a novel so that's why I'm using that word. She was the one who I think had the most difficult time because she was so young, and she was torn between her parents, and she witnessed some terrible things. And so I'm not surprised that she was left with some pretty deep scars, but but Sarah herself believe that they had made some progress later on in life and repairing some of that damage. And one of the interesting things is that Woods son whose name was also Erskine was really always very straight with his father. He thought his father had done a very terrible thing to his mother. And so he was never very friendly to Sarah until after his mother died and then you know he felt he could put his loyalty to his mother to rest. But even so there was tension in that relationship big time between Erskine and his son. But later in life after Erskine, the father had died, Erskine the son was looking at old letters and he wrote one to Sarah in like 1970. And he said now I feel so badly that I hadn't really done more to understand my father. And this was a letter that was in that collection that Peter was talking about that Kay brought to him many years after the original collection was given to Donington. And she and Kay wrote on this in her handwriting. This letter was of an estimate value to my mother. So you know in the end, the families found some reconciliation some moments of genuine connection and forgiveness I would even say for what it happened. So sorry about that but I wanted to add that to Peter's comments. Okay, Sinbad has another question. Any indications from your research regarding the attribution of the famous quote from Chief Joseph to CES Wood. This is a question that has been asked before and there is debate about what role did Wood play in actually creating at least part of the rhetoric of that. Joseph's speech where I come down on this is I do believe he embellished whatever it was that Chief Joseph said when he was surrendering he certainly said something. But Wood really made a point of seeking him out and befriending him and talking to him about his family and so forth, right after the surrender he really admired Chief Joseph. And he as I have indicated it was, you know, he was a closet poet. And so I do believe he had something to do with some of those poetic flourishes to where the sun now stands I will fight no more for forever. But there is really in the end no way to absolutely prove that and and Wood himself denied that he insisted that these were the very words that Chief Joseph said but others that were there said he didn't really say very much at all. I don't know. I don't know. I guess Wood did not want to take away from from Chief Joseph by maybe suggesting that he had, you know, added a little flourish here and there. Hey, you have to think the more you read, especially in in Sherry's book of course where they're generous quotations from writings by both Sarah and CES. The more you immerse yourself in CES Woods rhetoric, the more easily you can, you can almost see CES standing there that dashing cavalier with the, you know, the Cape and the Keppie and everything. I'm practicing here me my chief. You know, it, it, it has that Victorian flourish of eloquence and rhetoric, but I agree, there's no way to, to be absolutely certain, but it wouldn't be nice in some ways to think he did because he that message has resonated for so long with so many Americans that it would really be nice to, to think that our man CES had at least a little influence in, in bringing that kind of sentiment to the fore for how Americans view First Nation peoples. Now at the time of course he had no idea that this would become famous. So I think he just really wanted to convey to whoever read this. This is what's happening here and this is a human being and he wanted to get some of his own emotional reactions to what had been happening, including through his discussions with Joseph I think to put them down on paper so I think but I don't think he ever imagined that we would be talking about it in So, but that has been in fact the, the effect of whoever penned it or played with it really has helped the cause for sure. I guess for anymore or We're going to have to wrap up right now but first of all I just wanted to say that for our audiences. Sherry's book is an intimate and beautifully written portrait of these very iconic larger than life personalities and what they had to give to each other and also what they gave to the world and they're in their own way and their time. But I highly recommend the book I'm enjoying it and of course, once again, if you can purchase your book at one of our independent bookstores Alexander book.com would be our choice as it's right near Mechanics Institute and our vendor. But I really appreciate both having author Sherry Smith and Dr. Peter Blotch it with us to explore these two lives and we thank you for coming and please join us again and we hope to see you soon. Thank you. All right, thank you very much Laura. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. Thank you for lovely time.